Andrew Bacevich: Why America’s All-Volunteer Force fails to win wars

A conundrum: Today's American soldier is by common consent the world's finest, even history's finest, but the United States doesn't win its wars. Time and again, the mission – the overall aim of the exercise – goes unaccomplished, while the war itself continues as if on autopilot. Why?

Instinctively, and not entirely without reason, Americans hold politicians responsible for failing to deliver victories promised and expected. For many, it’s all George W. Bush’s fault. For others, it’s Barack Obama’s. Dig a bit deeper, however, and the American people themselves share in the culpability.

Put simply, the nation’s military system is out of sync with its military ambitions. That system, euphemistically known as the All-Volunteer Force or AVF, employs a mix of patriotic appeals and material blandishments to induce young Americans to go fight in distant lands. Yet those responding to these inducements are too few in number to get the job done. This is notably the case in the greater Middle East, for decades now the epicenter of U.S. military activity. Ironically, the very doggedness of those who do serve – nursing the hope that one more deployment on top of the last three or four might finally close the deal – provides a handy excuse for ignoring the futility of the larger enterprise on which the United States has embarked.

Worst of all, the rest of us – the non-volunteers – don’t see any of this as a problem.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate the point. For years, the troops fought. From the sidelines, meanwhile, came vapid expressions of “support,” rarely translating into anything substantive.

Numbers tell the story. Opinions may differ on how many troops it would take to secure the population, territory, and borders of Iraq and Afghanistan, the former larger than California and the latter roughly the size of Texas. But as a rough estimate, let’s posit a half-million – for each. Taken at face value, that’s a very considerable figure. In the context of previous large-scale American wars and relative to the current population, it’s not.

Even so, in neither theater did the United States ever came close to meeting that requirement. The Pentagon’s commitment to Iraq topped out at 158,000 during the so-called “Surge.” In Afghanistan, U.S. troop strength peaked at 98,000 during President Obama’s first term. We can gauge the shortfall in U.S. troops by tallying up the number of “defense contractors” – another misleading euphemism – hired to perform (typically at exorbitant prices) duties traditionally assigned to soldiers. Astonishingly, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors equaled or outnumbered U.S. uniformed personnel.

So as measured by the number of troops putting their lives on the line, historians will not enshrine Iraq or Afghanistan alongside the Civil War, the world wars, or Vietnam on the roster of this nation’s Big Wars. Iraq and Afghanistan do, however, head the list of our Long Wars. At least in part, they ended up being long because they were not big. That is, the insufficiency of boots on the ground imposed constraints on the commanders charged with waging them.

Not that the views of U.S. commanders or even the commander-in-chief himself carry much weight on that score. Under the terms of the AVF, the issue is not theirs to decide. The bargain implicit in the All-Volunteer Force from the moment of its inception redefined military service as choice rather than obligation. This bargain leaves it to ordinary Americans to decide how much wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan should matter. Their limited willingness to volunteer suggests their answer: Not much.

Crucially, this indifference toward wars in which Americans as a whole are so little invested allows policymakers to continue those wars in perpetuity, with few questions asked. War thereby becomes a normal condition, with peace at best a theoretical proposition.

The complaint here is not that in a time of protracted armed conflict a mere 1 percent serve. Rather, the complaint is that the other 99 percent find the arrangement and ensuing results tolerable. A conspiracy of silence, or perhaps a clamor of hollow cheerleading, shields our prevailing military system from critical scrutiny. Political and military leaders collaborate in ignoring its shortcomings. The great majority of Americans finds it expedient to go along.

Now, the line of argument presented above invites the retort: Ah, you’re calling for conscription.

Yet the real issue is much more fundamental. The question that demands attention is not whether the United States should restore the draft – about as likely as reviving prohibition — but whether it can devise a military system consistent with both U.S. national security priorities and American values. By the most fundamental criteria — Does it yield the desired results? Is it democratic? — the existing AVF satisfies neither.

The solution lies in ensuring that priorities and values align. At present, they do not. Stripped to its essentials, the prevailing definition of U.S. interests requires the United States to exercise global leadership, relying on superior military might to punish, pacify, and police. Meanwhile, the prevailing definition of American values, emphasizing the uninhibited pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, increasingly centers on personal self-actualization.

To fulfill its self-imposed obligations as sole superpower, the United States would need a citizenry that subscribes to the warrior-patriot's code: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country. Most Americans are far more likely to subscribe to the code vividly displayed each weekend in Style sections of newspapers. There, the appeal of dying for one's country takes a backseat to the latest tips on relationships, restaurants, recipes, street wear, household furnishings, and places to be seen.

Between what our duties as a self-proclaimed indispensable nation ostensibly require and what our freewheeling culture encourages, there exists a contradiction. In the White House, the Pentagon, and the Congress, the stewards of U.S. national security policy assume they can manage that contradiction. Yet day-by-day, evidence suggesting otherwise piles up.

When conceived toward the end of Vietnam, the All-Volunteer Force assured Americans that the government would never again force citizens to fight a war they oppose. Henceforth, when it came to military service, the state might solicit, but it could no longer command.

For civilian and military officials charged with managing American wars, the AVF offered a different set of assurances: Never again would their successors have to tolerate the popular obstructionism that had complicated Vietnam. The All-Volunteer Force promised them autonomy.

In the event, the AVF delivered on both of these expectations, albeit with consequences that few expected. Today, the people have by-and-large tuned out war or accept it as someone else’s concern. Meanwhile, the free hand allowed the national security establishment has encouraged the worst sort of mindless groupthink. Rather than replicating the errors of Vietnam, the AVF has fostered new ones, chief among them a collective abrogation of civic responsibility that underwrites sustained military malpractice.

Thus does the AVF persist. It does so not because it works but because Americans choose to ignore its defects, thereby turning a blind eye to the sacrifices exacted of the troops and the outcomes of the wars we charge them with fighting. Painful as it may be to acknowledge, those sacrifices have been largely pointless and the outcomes uniformly disappointing. When will anyone take notice?

Andrew J. Bacevich is the author of the new book America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. He will appear at the Dallas Book Festival at the central library on April 30. Fing out more at dallasbookfestival.org.